


Turning Points

by servantofclio



Series: Sewers to Stars [7]
Category: Mass Effect, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles - All Media Types
Genre: F/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-05
Updated: 2014-11-05
Packaged: 2018-02-24 05:47:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2570366
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/servantofclio/pseuds/servantofclio
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After spending nearly a year in London, April's trying to cope with how things have and haven't changed. Surely she has enough time to figure things out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Turning Points

**Author's Note:**

> This is a follow-up to my story Fellowship, and refers to both that and Hero's Homecoming. Huge thanks to theherocomplex for beta reading and making excellent suggestions.

_2183_

 

April crouches on a rooftop, eyes scanning the darkened street below. It’s a cool, damp night, chilly with the promise of winter ahead, but she is more than warm enough. She feels flushed, in fact, sharp with anticipation. She imagines herself a weapon eager for its first outing in months. It’s not far from the truth; she missed this, the feel of cold air and grit on her skin while she strives to keep silent in the dark. She’s been training twice a day, three or four hours, on top of her hours in the lab, to get her conditioning back. And not just that, but to relearn the feel of her weapon in her hand, how to position herself, how to work with the rest of the team. Yesterday she and Splinter and Leo all agreed she was ready. She’s going to pay for the late night at work tomorrow, but it’s worth it.

 

Leo’s a meter to her right, so still and silent he might as well be a statue. Raph and Mikey are a couple of rooftops away, watching the opposite entrance of what might be an innocuous warehouse or office space. Casey and Donnie are at ground level, taking a look at the building’s security and poking around in the trash if they can. April wouldn’t have thought of Casey as being good at that sort of thing, but, as Leo explained earlier, he’ll run distraction if anyone does show up unexpectedly.

 

Donnie’s quiet voice comes over April’s comm link. “I can crack the locks if we need to, but I’d rather not break in just for kicks.”

 

“Any sign that it’s actually Cerberus?” Leo asks.

 

“Dunno. Whole lot of scientific crap down here,” Casey says. April catches a burst of rueful feeling from him.

 

“Even Cerberus doesn’t throw away their secrets. Most of the time, anyway. But there might be some stuff we can use,” Donnie says.

 

“Since that’s a bust,” Raph interrupts, “we’ve got some goons sneaking around over here. Five of them. Purple Dragons, I think, might be about to break into something.”

 

April glances to the side and catches Leo frowning. “Okay,” he says. “Keep an eye on them and go in if necessary. April and I will swing over to back you up. Casey, Donnie, go ahead and see what you can salvage.”

 

“Great, missing out again,” Casey says, with a long-suffering sigh that rattles in April’s ear, but he doesn’t seem too unhappy.

 

April follows Leo’s lead. Her legs move, her heart pumps, her lungs expand. She feels aware of every part of her body, a far cry from the sludgy stiffness that she got used to in London. She runs and leaps onto the next rooftop, lands almost silently, sprints with long strides across the flat surface. She’s not even breathing that hard. She can do this. She’s still not in top shape; watching Leo descend into the fight Raph and Mikey started in a whirl of blue and silver demonstrates that all too clearly. But she’s good _enough_. She’s not a liability. She slides down the fire escape herself, jumps the last level, flings her _tessen_ and nails the guy Mikey was distracting. Within minutes the gang members are unconscious or running away (one of them obviously high and screaming about things in the shadows). April gathers herself, breathing hard. Her blood sings in her ears. She did it, she can still do it; she can have her shadow life back.

 

Mikey grabs her in a swift hug. “Awesome, April!” he says, jubilant even at low volume. “You rocked that!”

 

She stops fighting her urge to grin and hugs him back. “Thanks, Mikey.”

 

They slip through the shadows to meet up with Casey and Donnie, who’s now lugging a gigantic coil of cable. That means they cut the patrol short, with a certain amount of grumbling from Raph and Casey, and slip back underground at their earliest opportunity.

 

Part of April wants to grumble with them. She feels like she could run for another hour, at least, and she’s been longing for action for so long that she hates to go back now. But the truth is, things are quieter than they used to be. The Kraang are long gone, and the Foot are mostly lying low. Besides the street gangs, these days their main target is Cerberus, and tracking down the slippery organization is tricky, even with the data that Shepard’s been throwing their way. Tonight’s investigation was another dead end, but that only dampens April’s spirits a little. Elation is still buzzing through her system, keeping her from feeling too tired, even though there’s an ache starting in her muscles.

 

She steals a glance at Donnie, still hauling the giant coil over his shoulder, and, on impulse, falls into step beside him. “Need a hand with that?”

 

“Nah, I’ve got it,” he says.

 

#

 

She looks happy. Her hair is flattened by the hood she was wearing, and stuck to her forehead and cheeks with sweat, and she’s practically glowing, a smile playing about her lips as she wipes her bangs away. She looks the happiest he’s seen her since she got back from London—and she didn’t usually look that happy while she was _in_ London, either, so Donnie hasn’t seen April look that happy in months.

 

What has it been? About two months since she got back. She’s been around the lair a lot, mostly training, with that little pucker in her forehead and a look of concentration in her eyes, working herself harder than any of them. She’d snapped at his every attempt to make sure she was okay, snarled that she was fine when he asked if she needed a break, even after Mikey had accidentally thrown her to the ground while she was still sporting the bruises from sparring with Raph the day before. It was probably his own fault, the way he’d talked the night she’d come home, questioning her judgment. It wasn’t the welcome she deserved. It wasn’t the welcome he’d wanted to give her, either. He wanted— well, it wasn’t as if he was ever really going to give her a welcome home like in a vid, meeting her at the airport with an armful of flowers. But he’d wanted to welcome her properly, and he’d screwed that up. He just... hadn’t understood, and he hated the idea that she might be limiting herself, and when he’d asked too many questions he’d upset her. Ever since, things had been— prickly. One moment, she seemed fine, settling into her old space in the couch or wheeling into the lab to ask his opinion on something. The next, she’d be coiled with tension, sarcastic, seeking anyone’s company but his.

 

“What?” she says, observing his gaze. “Do I have something on my face?”

 

“No!” Donnie says, embarrassed to be caught out. “You just look—” He stops himself, looking at where he’s putting his feet.

 

“I look what?”

 

“Happy,” he’s forced to admit.

 

She blinks, and her smile returns. “Well, that’s not so bad.”

 

“No,” he says, adjusting the hang of the cable on his shoulder. “Listen, April— I’m sorry.”

 

“For what?” Her brow creases a little, though she’s still smiling.

 

“I know I was out of line when you came back,” he says. “And I know things have been weird between us since. I shouldn’t have pushed you about staying in New York, I just—”

 

He stops when he feels her hand on his arm, and looks down to see her looking back, eyes bright and smile soft. “I know you just want what’s best for me, Donnie.”

 

“... right,” he says quietly.

 

April takes a deep breath. “But you have to realize—I figured out in London that I don’t want to just chase after my career like that. I need _this_ , too.” She waves her free hand in a loose circle.

 

“I get that, yeah,” he says. The look on her face right now says it all.

 

“I really am where I want to be.” She squeezes his wrist lightly. “Right here, with you.”

 

He’s caught off-guard at that, and his step falters. He looks down at her quizzically. He can’t help but smile back at her, though; she looks bright and hopeful and beautiful even in the darkness of the tunnels. “I really am glad you’re back,” he says. “I missed you.”

 

Her smile twists a little. “I missed you, too.”

 

#

 

There’s still too much guilt on his face, and regret. Maybe April wouldn’t see it if she couldn’t feel it, too—but maybe she would. Donnie’s never been good at hiding things from her. But those darker feelings are starting to clear, the mournful gray ripples of his thoughts easing back into something more content. He’s smiling at her, gently and a little wistfully. She remembers what Splinter told her during a private training session, not so long ago— _my sons grew accustomed to the idea that you would not return_ —and it makes something hurt inside her, like she swallowed a stone. She never meant it to be like that. She never meant him to think she was going away forever, and she so wishes she could undo the last year, roll back to where they used to be. Except she didn’t know her own heart, then. So she says, instead, in a rush, “I missed you so much, you really... you have no idea.”

 

His forehead creases in puzzlement, and April wonders if maybe she sounds a little too intense. Which isn’t what she means, either, and she’s an intelligent person, a full-grown adult, but she hasn’t quite been able to find the right words. She thought it would be easier once she was here in New York, but she was wrong. Too much has changed, and not enough. She’s trying to find her place in the group again, but she wants that space to be different than it was.

 

And maybe she’s just a coward, and she’s afraid of being rejected by the one person who’s always been there to lend her a hand.

 

They’re almost to the lair by now, and April feels a faint burn across her cheeks as she realizes she still has her hand on Donnie’s arm, cool to the touch and solid with muscle. They’re still walking, and he’s still giving her a vaguely puzzled look. But, instead of pulling her hand away, she decides she’ll let herself be a little bold. Maybe it’s the endorphins still flooding her system after her first real patrol in a year. She lets her hand stay where it is, and squeezes again, just slightly.

 

Donnie glances at her hand, and the little furrow between his eyes deepens, but he doesn’t shake her off or seem distressed.

 

Neither of them gets a chance to say anything more, though; there’s a sudden clatter as the others, ahead of them, reach the entrance to the lair, and then Metalhead whizzes past them, toward Donnie, uttering a series of squeaks and chirps.

 

The robot’s approach makes April let go of Donnie’s arm and take a step away. Something about Metalhead’s impassive gaze makes her self-conscious, as if she’s been caught out. Maybe it’s that, unlike with a human being, she never has any idea what the AI is thinking or feeling, and it chooses to communicate, most of the time, in a sort of coded language of clicks and whistles that she’s never been able to make heads or tails of. It’s only been a few years since Donnie started rebuilding Metalhead, starting with the memory from the version destroyed years ago; Donnie said that he’d installed a full voice synthesizer this time, but Metalhead apparently insisted on sounding like R2-D2, for reasons best known to himself.

 

“What’s up, buddy?” Donnie is saying now, frowning as he listens.

 

Leo and Mikey pause in the doorway, letting Raph and Casey go on ahead. “Is something wrong?” Leo asks; April can see him tensing.

 

Donnie looks up suddenly. “Turn on the news; Metalhead says he’s been scanning the extranet news sites, and something’s... it sounds like the Citadel is under attack.”

 

That doesn’t seem real, or even possible, for a moment, and then April’s gut freezes. By the time she gets inside, Mikey’s already wrested the remote control away from Raph and found a news report, where a serious-looking woman is saying, “... footage from before the relays were closed indicates the sudden appearance of a geth fleet.” The camera switches to a brief, blurry image of the insect-like geth ships moving through space, at their head a vast, dark ship unlike any April had seen before. “Shepard said there was a ship,” she hears herself saying. “On Eden Prime.”

 

“Shepard—” Donnie drops the coil of cable he’s been lugging. It falls to the floor with a thud as he activates his omni-tool. “She didn’t send a message,” he says, scanning through the screens.

 

“She might not have had time,” Leo says. “Or privacy.”

 

“What is happening?” Splinter emerges from his quarters, hands tucked into the sleeves of his robe.

 

On screen, the camera cuts back to the reporter. “Once again, the Citadel appears to be under attack. We’re getting conflicting reports. Some transmissions indicate geth have already infiltrated the Citadel, but others report a fleet engaging with the Council’s defensive armada. What we do know is that all relays into the Widow system are currently non-functional, and we’re having difficulty getting reliable communications from the system, as well. With me now is—”

 

April slowly moves to a seat and sinks into it as the reporter talks to some scientist they’ve rounded up, a dark-skinned man who begins to expound on the mass relay technology, and how it might be possible to control a system’s mass relays.

 

“We just gonna sit here and listen to this?” Raph demands.

 

“Can’t exactly go out and do anything about it,” Leo replies, eyes fixed on the screen.

 

That’s the worst of it; there’s nothing they _can_ do. April sits and fidgets, her body tense as strung wire even though she’s sitting. She glances at Donnie, but he and Metalhead are scanning through extranet news to see if they can find any more information than what the main Earth channels have. Raph almost goes out again, over Leo’s objections, until Splinter forbids it. “If the Citadel falls,” he says, “we do not know what may come next. Let us remain together.”

 

“This could take hours,” Raph grumbles, and stalks off to relieve his frustrations on the punching bag. Casey stays, one knee bouncing up and down, just as riveted on the screen as April. She can’t look away, even though they know practically nothing. The news people are clearly scrambling to cope with next to no information—they drag in some other expert on mass relays, and then somebody who claims he’s a geth expert and nearly gets into a screaming match with a quarian woman that they somehow got on the set. That’s somewhat diverting, at least, although the lack of real information about what’s going on at the Citadel grates on April’s nerves. She agrees to help Mikey and Leo make sandwiches just to have something to do, and of course that’s when word breaks that the relays have re-opened, allowing the Alliance Fifth Fleet to get from Arcturus Station to the Citadel.

 

“Did they say anything about Shepard?” she asks, running back into the living room with a plate heaped high with sandwiches.

 

“No,” says Donnie, transfixed—everyone is focused on the screen now, even Raph, because now they’ve got shaky footage from the fleet itself. There’s definitely a battle going on, but there’s so much movement and chaos that it’s hard to tell what’s going on. Leo and Donnie fall into a muttered conversation about what types of ships are engaging. April catches a glimpse of the Citadel’s five vast ward-arms moving—opening? Yes, the current reporter is breathlessly announcing that, and pointing out the dark ship from the earlier footage, now somehow attached to the station’s infrastructure. There’s enough movement to give April vertigo, and she’s not a person who gets dizzy easily. She stuffs her ham and cheese sandwich into her mouth more out of duty than appetite, and the others seem to feel the same when she passes the plate. The battle seems to go on for a long time, all careening camera angles and dazzling explosions. The reporter explains that they’re seeing action transmitted by a civilian freighter that happened to be caught in Citadel space when the relays closed, but there’s no audio to go with it. That leaves the reporter to speculate about what’s going on, even though she’s no better informed than the rest of them.

 

April registers an explosion in the lower left part of the screen, the heart of the Citadel itself; the camera jerks around to focus on it, and it looks like the huge dark ship was the center of the explosion. A few minutes later, the reporter says, “It appears the geth are now in retreat, yes, it looks like the tide has turned. I’m getting— unofficial sources within the Alliance are stating that the geth flagship seems to have been destroyed—”

 

“Guess that’s it, then,” Casey mutters.

 

“Still a lot of mopping up out there,” Leo returns.

 

April checks the time and is startled to realize that it’s only been about an hour and a half since they came in. Everything has happened much faster than she realized. The endorphins from earlier in the evening have faded, leaving her nerves jangled and her body aching.

 

The reporter is still rambling about the geth action—she looks as exhausted as April feels—and then suddenly says, “We’re also seeing a restoration of normal communications, which allows us to bring you this special report from the Citadel itself.”

 

The screen flickers and yields a grainy feed featuring a young woman standing in front of a debris-littered background. “Hello, viewers, this is Emily Wong, happy to be reporting to you from the Citadel. As you can see, there’s been a lot of damage here, although I’ve been told that this area is clear of geth forces.” A pair of turian C-Sec officers pass across the screen behind her, both armed with assault rifles. “About two hours ago, what seemed like an ordinary day on the Citadel was disrupted when the station was suddenly swarming with geth—”

 

Raph stands abruptly. “They’re not gonna know anything for hours.”

 

“Yeah, you’re probably right.” Casey stands, stretching his long frame.

 

Raph mutters something about not waiting around any more, and the two of them disappear down the hallway. April sighs, trying to get herself to relax. Donnie is cruising the extranet feeds again; he’s the one who says, about twenty minutes later, after Mikey’s wandered off as well, “There’s talk of an Alliance infiltration team being the ones who opened up the station and activated the relays. It’s—yeah, a couple of sources say it was Shepard. That’s not being officially confirmed yet, though.”

 

“Is she okay?” Leo and April ask at the same time.

 

Donnie hunches his shoulders. “Don’t know.”

 

April bites her lip and keeps watching, even though her eyes are dry and stinging now. Splinter retires, quietly enough that she doesn’t notice he’s gone right away. The room sinks into quiet, only the voices of the reporters offering an increasingly disjointed commentary—they have more sources of information now, but they’re switching from one to another fast enough that April’s tired mind is starting to have trouble tracking it.

 

Eventually, Metalhead beeps, and it’s Donnie, again, who says, “They found her.”

 

Leo switches off the vidscreen, rubbing his eyes. “Shepard? Is she—”

 

“She’s alive,” Donnie confirms. “Sounds like her whole team made it.”

 

April sighs, her shoulders slumping. Her neck and back feel tight and achy. “Okay,” she says. “Okay, I’m done for the night. Can I crash here?”

 

“Spare room’s made up,” says Donnie absently. “I’m just going to check a few more things.”

 

“Don’t stay up too late,” Leo says, out of habit.

 

April barely makes it to the spare room and then just flops onto it, face-first. She’s used to late nights, but this one was something else altogether.

 

Going to work the next day is almost as painful as she expected, except that everyone’s talking about the geth attack on the Citadel. For the next week, almost no one talks about anything else. It’s a wonder anyone at April’s lab gets any work done at all. In the midst of all that, Donnie gets an encrypted message from Shepard, reassuring them that she’s fine. Better than that, she’s coming to New York for a few interviews.

 

There’s so much commotion around the whole thing that April puts off talking to Donnie, again. There’s Shepard’s visit, and then her lab group has to get cracking on their project to meet a deadline, and then the holidays are coming up—

 

The morning Shepard was about to leave New York, when she and April talked privately, she’d said: “ _Just... make a move, April. Be stupidly happy together and make science._ ” April thinks this over, in the days that follow. It sounds good. It sounds nice. But—she still can’t find the right time. Whenever she goes down to the lair, Donnie is diving into all the data Shepard collected. He’s got his teeth into the project; he’s all bright eyes and late nights and gallons of coffee. It’s difficult to get him to pay attention to anything else, plus she hates to distract him when he’s that intent. Besides, it’s about to be the holidays, and Mikey is already making grandiose plans. April doesn’t want to put any kind of weird pressure on Donnie, or make things strange for anyone else over Christmas. No. She’ll wait until after the new year, until things quiet down a little, and then she’ll find a time and place to have a long, quiet talk. It’ll be fine.

 

In the back of her head, a small voice that sounds a little like Shepard tries to say she’s wrong, that events are moving faster than she thought, that calamity is on the way. April pushes it away, impatient. Even Shepard, the real Shepard, thinks they’ve won some time. April can collect her thoughts and figure things out. There’s still time. Let Christmas and New Year’s go by, and in the quiet cold of January, she’ll find the words she needs.


End file.
